What has been bothering me is the way that we need to find ways of changing thinking. In John Gribbin's The Fellowship the writer brings out the seismic shifts of thinking that came about from Aristotelian thought to the Scientific Revolution and the scientific method. So what has this to do with the Baroque Cycle?
Simple. Stephenson uses the founding ofthe Royal Society almost as a way of articulating what thinkers and doers like Tim Berners-Lee have been doing with the Internet. The Royal Society and the letters that float around Europe are clearly analogous to the 1990s, also utilising the development of mercantile networks.
Perhaps one of the points of the Baroque Cycle is to try and explore how thinking changed and developed.
Intriguingly Stephenson has avoided the hyped, vaunted, played with Web 2.0 and has kept the same vision of a network about an online library of information, an infinitely extensible archive. He pretty much comes up with this in the long monologue that Leibniz has about his library idea. However it requires a radical change of thought to create, maintain this purity.
Stephenson is on record (on his website) as denying that he is a political writer and purely aims to recreate the psyches of people in the period with their paradigms. So he's not telling the reader how to think but does manage to explore how they think so this may influence the reader to consider their own position. Perhaps.
